We had an email from someone wondering why Better doesn’t make Safari appear safe according to Panopticlick.

So Aral had a quick look at Panopticlick and concluded:

Panopticlick are using their own simulated third-party trackers to check for tracker blocking. Better crawls the web to find actual third-party trackers and blocks them specifically so as not to break general functionality on the web. We crawl for the most popular trackers and block them to provide the greatest practical coverage for the greatest number of people.

We could easily block the three test sites Panopticlick uses (and we might, so it does not give people a false result) but that’s not a good indication of whether trackers are being blocked.

Basically, any tool could block the following three test domains only and appear to pass their tracker test, when in reality, they would not be blocking any trackers whatsoever:

Unfortunately, this means that Panopticlick can’t possibly be an indicator of whether tracking is blocked in a browser. All it proves is that a browser or browser extension has added the Panopticlick simulated domains to their blocking rules.

Note that nothing has changed in Better apart from the fact that we’re blocking the three “simulated tracker domains” to make Panopticlick happy. This is a completely meaningless test but I chose to implement it as it was otherwise providing erroneous results from a trusted source (EFF).

What’s more dangerous is that anyone can block just those three domains and Panopticlick will erroneously tell people that they are being protected from trackers.

To see if Better is blocking trackers on a particular site in real time, first enable Safari’s Developer tools:
Go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced
Select the checkbox labelled “Show Develop menu in menu bar”
Close Preferences, return to the web page
From Safari’s top menu, select Develop > Show Error Console
Anything blocked by a content blocker will be shown here as information in the Error Console, like this:
[Screenshot of Error Console showing multiple instances of content blocker p…